Creative Activism

The New York Post is just catching up… In December of 1984, Joseph Virgil Skaggs (a.k.a. Joey Skaggs) formed WALK RIGHT! — an ad hoc group of vigilante sidewalk etiquette enforcers who patrolled the streets to make New York a better place to live and walk. Dressed in all black with WALK RIGHT! sweat shirts they enforced a list of sixty six rules for pedestrians they wanted enacted into law.

Welcome to Gridlock Central, otherwise known as New York City during the holidays. It helps to remember that you’re not in Kansas anymore — or Manitoba, for that matter. Life will be so much better for yourself and everyone around you if you observe a few basic rules.
In other words, walk this way:

Keep right.
If you’re walking more slowly than the natives — and there’s a good reason for the phrase “a New York minute” — stay to the right on stairs, escalators and sidewalks, so we can step nimbly by you.

Separate.
Two-by-two worked for Noah’s Ark, but not Midtown. If you must hold hands, prepare to break away when we come barreling toward you, desperate to flag that cab. Walking four abreast as a family? Fuhgeddaboutit. Pair off and stay close.

Don’t stop short.
Unless, of course, you’re about to be run over. But certainly step aside and out of traffic’s way to admire that tall building, marvel at a panhandler or snap a selfie. Speaking of which:

Don’t text in revolving doors.
Even seasoned New Yorkers can’t juggle that. You can wait 30 seconds before tweeting, “Guess where I am?”

At the “Robot Dance Protest” at Federal Hall back in the early days of the Dance Liberation Front, from left, patriots John Foster, Rev. Jen, and Faceboy. Photo courtesy Rev. Jen.

It’s time for a victory dance! After 91 years, New York’s archaic Cabaret Law has been repealed in a 41-to-1 vote. So put on your dancin’ shoes, wave your hands in the air like you just don’t care, head to your favorite watering hole, and shake your booty clean off. (We have to wait until 30 days until after de Blasio signs off on the legislation, but it’s never too early to practice your moves at home.)

This victory holds a special space in my heart, as I have been working on the law’s repeal since 1998 when I formed the Dance Liberation Front (DLF), along with fellow Art Stars Robert Prichard and Faceboy.

It all started one morning when I bumped into Robert Prichard, the proprietor of the now-defunct Surf Reality (172 Allen St., btw. Stanton & Rivington Sts.). He told me that the previous evening, Baby Jupiter, a nearby club where I performed every Monday, was busted because their customers had been dancing.

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly.

“Dancing?” I asked.

Rob explained that in order to crack down on nightlife, Giuliani had dusted off a regulation from the 1920s called the “Cabaret Law,” which states that more than four people dancing in an unlicensed venue serving alcohol is illegal. Out of the thousands of bars in New York City, only a handful of the most well-financed clubs were able to obtain the dancing license.

It took a minute to process the Kafkaesque concept: Dancing was illegal in “Fun City.”

Rob suggested we create a group — the DLF — to bring to light the heinous crime Guiliani’s nightlife task force was perpetrating on the public. Read the rest of this story here.

A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.

In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.

The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with inconsistencies in her story and an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists.

But on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover “stings” that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias. Read more.

Gizmodo investigates confusing robocalls warning people to stop criticizing President Trump. Some of the recipients are harsh Trump critics, some aren’t. Some known political provocateurs may or may not be involved, and no one really gets it.

Brett Vanderbrook was driving for Uber last week when he got a call from an unfamiliar number. He let it go to voicemail and when he listened to it later, he got a shock: It was a recorded message telling him to stop making “negative and derogatory posts about President Trump.”

“It was kind of threatening. I was dumbfounded at first and then creeped out,” Vanderbrook, who lives in Dallas, Texas, said in a phone interview. “Then I was angry and that’s when I decided to share it.”

Vanderbrook makes progressive political posts on Facebook, voicing support for gun control, LGBTQ rights, and immigrant rights. None of his public posts mention President Trump or come across as “derogatory.”

Vanderbrook is not alone, though. Across the country, and even in Canada, people have reported on social media that they’ve received the same robocall. The earliest complaint dates back to July. The intensity of the calling campaign is hard to gauge; a search of complaints turned up 10 reports scattered across different platforms.

The reports, though, are all consistent. When the call goes to voicemail, as it did for Vanderbrook, the beginning of the recording gets cut off, but people describing the calls on Twitter, Facebook, and the telemarketer-reporting site ShouldIAnswer.com have said that the recording claims to come from “Citizens for Trump.” Read more.

The world’s raunchiest card game has purchased a plot of vacant land along the Mexico-US border and has hired an eminent domain lawyer to make it “as time-consuming and expensive as possible” for the Trump administration to build its proposed wall.

To fund their effort, CAH offered a package of “six surprises” for $15 — all of which are now sold out.

Since the game was launched by 8 high school friends in 2011, it’s gained a reputation for pulling incredibly on-point PR stunts. Read more.

When: December 1st, 5-8pm during Oakland’s First Friday
Where: Directly outside the Feelmore Adult Gallery on Telegraph Avenue at 17th Street in San Francisco

The “Get Stuffed” Holiday Special Event will present a lot of entertaining activities, including “Sexual Compatibility” Tarot card readings, games of Spin-the-Bottle and official Church of the SubGenius “short-duration marriages” performed by Dr. Hal Robins. Acknowledging both potential religious restrictions and modern dating rituals, the union provided by these ceremonies dissolves at an agreed upon time.

“A chameleon-like ability to flourish simultaneously in multiple art forms marks the Protean presence of Spy Emerson. No stranger to controversy, her installations and public performances create lively attention wherever they turn up. Her creations, lately the subject of national attention and commentary, are always socially acute and with the essential leavening quality of informed playfulness and humor.” –Dr. Hal Robins, Church of the SubGenius

​Email scammers work in bulk, blasting out tons of emails in the hopes of getting a few bites which they can follow up on. To counter this, NetSafe, an online safety non-profit in New Zealand, built Re:scam, which messes with scammers automatically:

Re:scam can take on multiple personas, imitating real human tendencies with humour and grammatical errors, and can engage with infinite scammers all at once, meaning it can continue any email conversation for as long as possible. Re:scam will now turn the tables on the scammers by wasting their time, and ultimately damage the profits for scammers…
The aim is to waste the time of scammers, without wasting a second of yours. When you forward an email, you believe to be a scam to me@rescam.org a check is done to make sure it is a scam attempt, and then a proxy email address is used to engage the scammer. This will flood their inboxes with responses without any way for them to tell who is a chat-bot, and who is a real vulnerable target. Once you’ve forwarded an email nothing more is required on your part, but the more you send through, the more effective it will be [Re:scam]

According to a report by the Moscow Times, pranksters in Bulgaria are repainting Soviet-era monuments so that Soviet military heroes look like American Superheroes. Needless to say, the Russians are not too happy about it.

Donald Trump’s real estate holdings have provided excellent venues for pranksters, performance artists, and activists of all stripes. The Russian activist punk band Pussy Riot is using Trump’s Russia controversies to draw attention to the plight of political prisoners – and they know of what they protest.

The infamous Russian feminist punk rock group, clad in bright dresses and wool masks that covered their faces, stormed Trump Tower on Monday night to protest the incarceration of political prisoners.

Hidden behind their usual makeshift balaclavas, this time in green, pink and purple, the women unfurled a massive sign from an upper floor of the 58-story skyscraper that said “Free Sentsov” and dropped what appears to be a series of photographs, [the] video shows.

Frantic security guards rushed up the stairs to stop the girls, who were not arrested for their actions as portions of Trump Tower are open to the public.

“We’re calling on you today to raise attention to two guys from Ukraine: film director Oleg Sentsov and anarchist Olexandr Kolchenko, who are in Russian prison right now. Sentsov got 20 years in prison, Kolchenko got 10 years. Because they, like you, did not sit by — they were fighting for their freedom in Crimea, which was annexed by Putin,” the bad-girl group posted on Facebook.

“We decided to do an action right now, while we are in New York, with activists here because we believe there are no borders to our solidarity.” Read more.

As an artist, I discovered in the 1960s that I could use the mass media as a vehicle to make social and political commentary on a broad scale. So, for the last 50+ years, I’ve used the media as my medium as a painter uses a canvas. From my earliest performance pieces (a.k.a. media hoaxes), the Hippie Bus Tour to Queens, followed by the Cathouse for Dogs and the Celebrity Sperm Bank, I found that by creating plausible, but totally fictitious stories, played out in real life, I could hook the media into reporting them as fact.

The key to success has always been a salacious, sensational or ironic hook with a great visual that is just irresistible to reporters on tight deadlines…

15 year old Brady Olsen ran for President in 2016. It was his way of dissenting against the 2-party system. He did a pretty good job of it. Now that his story is history, the Feds have decided to pursue him on a technicality… faulty paper-work. They’re trying to stop other pretenders from making a mockery of our mock-worthy election system. Maybe in 20 years he’ll run for real.

It’s no secret that Mr. Nuts isn’t an actual person. Olson had revealed his true identity in 2015 and said he made up the candidate because he was fed up with the two-party system.

Olson wasn’t eligible from the start—constitutionally, presidents have to be at least 35 years old—but he was popular.

“I am a 15-year-old who filled out a form, had the campaign catch on fire, and am now putting up the best third-party numbers since Ross Perot,” he told the Guardian a 2015 email interview.

In August 2015, just after Trump launched his campaign, Public Policy Polling found that Nuts had the support of about 6 percent of voters in New Hampshire. By August 2016, as the race was entering its final stages, Nuts’ numbers in Texas showed he was more popular than Green Party nominee Jill Stein (but less well-liked than the late revered gorilla Harambe).

His campaign inspired more than a chuckle—as the National Journal wrote, Nuts “started a revolution.” Dozens of people filed forms with fake identities, like Limberbutt McCubbins, Mr. Crawfish B. Crawfish and Sydneys Voluptuous Buttocks.

Jared “Go Daddy” Kushner is in the news for using his private server to conduct White House business. It’s only a crime if you are a Democrat, so he has nothing to worry about, but that didn’t stop prankster @sinon_reborn from convincing Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, that he was Kushner and had been emailing porn through the server.

Turbulent times have brought increased attention for Snopes, the long-running, cred-heavy fact-checking website. This longform feature weaves a compelling tapestry of research, analysis, and narrative, including a raw and revealing interview with the site’s embattled cofounder David Mikkelson.

“It was early March, not yet two months into the Trump administration, and the new Not-Normal was setting in: It continued to be the administration’s position, as enunciated by Sean Spicer, that the inauguration had attracted the “largest audience ever”; barely a month had passed since Kellyanne Conway brought the fictitious “Bowling Green massacre” to national attention; and just for kicks, on March 4, the president alerted the nation by tweet, “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower.”

If the administration had tossed the customs and niceties of American politics to the wind, there was one clearly identifiable constant: mendacity. “Fake news” accusations flew back and forth every day, like so many spitballs in a third-grade classroom.

Feeling depressed about the conflation of fiction and fact in the first few months of 2017, I steered a car into the hills of Calabasas to meet with one person whom many rely on to set things straight. This is an area near Los Angeles best known for its production of Kardashians, but there were no McMansions on the street where I was headed, only old, gnarled trees and a few modest houses. I spotted the one I was looking for—a ramshackle bungalow—because the car in the driveway gave it away. Its license plate read SNOPES.” Read more.

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About

Welcome to the Art of the Prank, produced and edited by Joey Skaggs. Here you will find insights, information, news and discussions about art, pranks, hoaxes, culture jamming & reality hacking around the world - past, present and future - mainstream and counter culture. You are invited to contribute to its development. May your journey be filled with more than your expectations.